1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to systems, methods, and computer program products for meetings management, allocation, and reconciliation, and more particularly to an automated solution for managing billing, reconciliation, and payment of financial transaction instruments for meetings.
2. Related Art
Many business organizations send their employees to meetings. An organization may plan, arrange, or host a meeting or it may send one or more members to attend a meeting. Typically, an organization employs individuals known as event planners, who manage the meeting activities of the organization. An event planner may manage meetings for one subunit of an organization or for multiple subunits. Also, an event planner may manage one meeting at a time or may manage multiple meetings that overlap in time.
One system that is currently available for managing meetings is a computer that maintains a calendar of meetings. Such a computer can allow access to authorized users, who may be event planners, employees who attend meetings, executives of the organization, and others. Event planners can establish meetings and provide information about their times and locations. In addition, event planners can provide information about preferred hotels, airlines, and other travel providers for particular meetings. Employees who will attend a given meeting can view the relevant information.
One problem with available systems and methods of managing meetings is that it is difficult to account for meeting expenditures. Meeting expenditures differ in important ways from other business spending. One difference is that an organization may make expenditures for items that are peculiar to meetings, such as, for example, promotional materials, hotels, caterers, air travel, or other travel providers. Also, a meeting typically takes place in a particular location, where the organization may not often do business. The vendors that provide goods and services for the meeting may operate only locally, and the organization may not have long-term relationships with them. Thus, the organization may not be able to pay them with its ordinary processes.
Further, spending for a particular meeting commonly takes place only during preparing, planning and holding the meeting and shortly thereafter. Thus, a meeting typically involves large amounts of spending in a short period of time. Since the spending period may be shorter than ordinary budgeting periods, an organization may not be able to measure and control the spending using its ordinary processes. In addition, meeting expenditures may be made by event planners or by employees who attend meetings. These individuals may only be authorized to spend money for meetings and thus, may not be regular participants in an organization's ordinary financial processes.
For the above-stated reasons as well as others, an organization may have difficulty measuring and controlling meeting expenditures. Organizations need to measure and control spending to fulfill duties of fiscal responsibility, to ensure that employees spend only as they are authorized, and to ensure that they are operating at the lowest cost possible. Some organizations maintain specialized meetings management teams to perform these functions, but such teams can be expensive and slow.
Typically, an organization may ease the managing of meetings by distributing to its employees a financial transaction instrument with which they can spend on meetings. Such an instrument may be, for example, a charge or credit card. Such an instrument may be generically referred to as a meeting expense card. One example of such an instrument is the Meeting Card from American Express. Usually, a meeting expense card enables an individual to pay a vendor directly without the need for a pre-existing vendor-client relationship between the organization and the vendor.
However, while generally good for their intended applications, conventional meeting expense cards enable only limited measurement and control of spending. One problem with such cards is that they lack sufficient identifiers for expenditures, so that it is difficult to identify an expenditure with the meeting for which it was made. Another problem with conventional meeting expense cards is that they do not effectively track employee spending and reconcile it against original approved meeting budgets. Typically, an event planner will inspect a printed record of recent expenditures. To compare the actual amount of spending for a meeting to its budget, expenditures for that meeting must be found in multiple printed records and tallied. This time-consuming process is ordinarily performed infrequently, and even when it is done, it may occur after a meeting has ended. Thus, it is difficult to identify overspending or ensure that charges are correct for payment purposes. With conventional meeting expense cards, it may still be difficult to manage spending on meetings as it occurs.
Given the foregoing, what are needed are a system, method and computer program product for meetings management, allocation, and reconciliation.